Newton's Laws
by Slipstream
Summary: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Casey takes a fall.


Title: Newton's Laws  
Author: Slipstream  
Rating: PG-13/R (for language, mostly)  
Summary: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Casey takes a fall.  
Story Notes: This is somewhat inspired by my own personal fear about the stairs at our school. I'm not particularly sure Zeke has a name in cannon. Tyler is the last name given to him by WaxJism in the monumental "Void," and it seems to work so I'm adopting it here for one brief sentence.  
Historical Note: The Black Dahlia was the press name given to Elizabeth Short, a woman murdered in the 1950s. Her face was cut open and her body was drained of blood and cut in half at the waist and before it was arranged along the side of the road. The identity of her murderer and the reasons behind her brutal slaying are still unknown.   
  
Newton's First Law of Motion- An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion  
stays in motion unless a force acts upon the object.  
1. Inertia is the tendency of an object to resist a change in motion.   
2. Acceleration is any change in an object's speed or direction.  
3. Net force is the combination of all the forces working on an object.   
4. Equilibrium occurs when all the forces on the object are balanced. The net  
force is zero. The object stays at rest or stays in motion at a constant speed. No   
acceleration occurs.  
  
Casey's been hit before, no mistake about that. He's been hit in a varying and intriguing amount of combinations, so much so that one night he dreamt that a catalog of his bruises had been used to solve a formerly empty section of the chaos theory.  
  
Entropy- n.  
1. A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.  
2. A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message.  
3. The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve to  
a state of inert uniformity.  
4. Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society./i  
  
Casey's never been hit like this before.  
  
There's blood. A lot of blood, actually, he can tell that much from this rather awkward angle. It spreads like Dawn's rosy colored fingertips across the white tile, unbelievably red in the harsh lights of the florescent bulbs. Blood is only ever this red in the slasher movies, he thinks, and it normally doesn't have little clumps of hard white something scattered about. There's an ache in his jaw and a gap in the hard ridge of sharp dog teeth where his swollen tongue brushes hotly against a bleeding cheek. He takes a mental photograph. Click. Ladies and Gentlemen, the next image in the Conner collection, "Molar on Floor."  
  
He's too hot, too something, itchy and uncomfortable, but the floor beneath him is hard and cool, if a little gritty from the dirt and the bits and pieces of his own skull. He could lay pressed here like this for hours. Part of his brain tells him that he could probably get up or at least move if he tried, could twitch his fingers, could scream and cry and sob and bring help, but the rest of his mind's forgotten what its like to not be laying head smashed in bleeding dripping with maddening slowness down down down concrete stairs, so he doesn't.  
  
It was the backpack that did it, he realizes now. The backpack and the unfortunate implications of Newton's First Law. Gabe or one of his goons (he can never tell, they all look the same with their jerseys on…) gave him a right smart tap across the face just as he crossed the threshold of the stairwell. Nothing new, might have bruised some cartilage, shifted his nose a bit, maybe even a black eye. But the punch threw his balance off, made him tip backward into empty space, the burden of his books acting as a counterweight, and then he was falling bump bump bump with the rapid booming echoes of flesh and bones crashing into rubber tipped stairs.  
  
Newton's Second Law of Motion- An object's acceleration depends on the mass  
of the object and the magnitude and direction of the force acting on it./i   
  
Casey's been hit before. Casey's fallen down before. Casey has never thought that he wouldn't be getting up from his fall.   
  
Casey is about to change his mind.   
  
*Help, I've fallen and I can't get up.*  
  
It isn't so funny now. His feet are up higher on the landing than his head and torso, which is sort of splayed on the flat part of the switch-around between flights, but that should be helping him somewhat with shock, right? Only he thinks he's got it wrong, somehow. Somehow he doesn't remember his health class saying that a person should be bent or twisted 's'-like, doesn't think that the diagram on the overhead had the arms arranged one curled beneath the body fetally and the other splayed out somewhere where he can't feel it, like God reaching down to create Adam, doesn't remember if the correct answer on the test said whether or not the legs should be spread eagled and arched like a sex-crime victim.   
  
The Black Dahlia. One half of her here, the other half of her there in the long grass, arms and legs and guts opened invitingly with her eternal twelve inch smile. Every newspaper photographer's wet dream. Click click. Ladies and Gentlemen, exhibit A, the arrangement of the body.  
  
Casey can hear the loud buzz and scrape of the classes next door shifting in their chairs, silently counting the seconds until the bell. He fell (plummetedtumbledscreaming) at the beginning of third period, so it'll be at least an hour before that final bell releases everyone for lunch. Maybe then someone will find him. Maybe not.  
  
He hopes not.  
  
A spasm of pain shoots down his spine and he gets a flashvision of medics coming amidst the swarm of the student body to lift him into an ambulance with its lights off. He grins, imagining the look of dull horror blooming across the featureless sea of faces as one of the EMTs shakes his head and pulls the white sheet to cover his face. Cameras flash and the moment is captured on film, of course (Casey is on the newspaper staff, after all), and the photos circulate via USA Today to gas stations and hotels across the country. BOY KILLED IN TRAGIC FALL, the headline reads. SCHOOL UNDER SUSPICION. Business women sipping their coffee on a cross-country flight shake their heads in remorse, Such a shame, Such a shame, and Casey imagines one of them crying a little. They'll carve his name onto a cheap wood and brass plaque and mount it with his school picture from last year on the office wall with other students from throughout the years who have been canonized thusly In Memory Of.  
  
He must have passed out because he wakes up vomiting little dribbles of blood. There's a sickening squishy noise as his skull shifts against the hard floor and he almost blacks out again. His eyelids flutter and there's a sound of gentle crackling, crusted blood gumming his lashes together.   
  
Newton's Third Law of Motion - For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.   
  
The heavy door that leads to the basement creaks open and three human bodies cram into the first narrow set of stairs. Their breath goes huff huff and their feet echo against the hard floor and Casey giggles (more of a wet, gargly sort of moan, really) in anticipation at the scare they're about to get.   
  
"Jesus fuck!" somebody says.   
  
Casey couldn't have said it better himself.   
  
One of them stumbles back down the stairs to retch, the sick noises reverbrating up up up the stairway in little echoes of dry heaves. Casey's vision waters, and he can't turn his head to see who it is, can only stare up up up to follow the echoes until they meet the harsh light of the fluorescent bulbs. A face looms into his field of vision, then a second face, and they're both blurry for a second before the closest one clears enough for him to identify it.   
  
Zeke. Zeke Tyler pushing homemade narcotics to his fellow classmates in the stairwell during classes.   
  
"Fuck!" the second student says again, watching Casey with wide, stoned eyes.  
  
Zeke ignores him, waving a hand across Casey's eyes. Casey blinks, it's hard work, but he blinks, and thinks "Maybe I won't die after all."  
  
"What happened, man?" asks Zeke, and a knife flashes. Casey panics, thinks to the razored edge of the stairs, but Zeke only cuts away the lone remaining strap of Casey's backpack. His backpack. Oh. He'd forgotten about that. Now that he concentrates, Casey can feel that one of his shoulders is hitched up higher than the other, his over-weighted backpack this hard lump he's half laying on.   
  
Zeke pulls the backpack out carefully, trying to keep Casey as still as possible. It's impossible, though, and with the loss of the extra support to his neck and shoulder Casey feelssees the hot red rush of darkness pooling along the edge of his vision, pulling in, choking. Pain. His bones grate as they're shifted (he's always bruised easily, skin so fair, fingers finely constructed like the wing of a bird) and he coughs up more blood.  
  
Zeke looks scared. He shouldn't look scared, shouldn't express emotion over this crumpled, beaten thing at the bottom of the stairs, but he does. He does because he can see what Casey can't, can see and smell the red pool that's slowly growing on the smooth floor, and every human, great or small, has a programmed fight or flight instinct at the sight of blood.  
  
Zeke is going to fight.  
  
"Zeke…" the second figure quavers, looking very pale himself. "What do we do? You want I should hide the skat or…"  
  
Zeke glances at him like it's the first time he's seen him. "What do you think we do? You go and fucking find some help, that's what you do.."  
  
He backs up, wide-eyed, and he's skinny and young and just a freshman and Zeke's eyes flash and he goes.  
  
"You'll be okay, Casey," says Zeke, crouching beside him. "Scalp wounds bleed a lot, don't worry." He's been digging through his pockets and suddenly produces a crumpled up wad of Kleenex. Everyone carries Kleenex. It's a universal constant. The tissue is a little limp and lint-laden from life in Zeke's unwashed jeans but still mostly clean, and Zeke uses it to wipe a little of the blood away.  
  
Casey'd like to nod, like to say, yeah, sure, he'll be alright, thanks for the Kleenex, man, but something has hooked itself to the back of his naval and is pulling him down, down into the warm wet darkness, free of pain. Underwater in a sea of oil. Ghosts with strong eyes and mouths swathed in cloth of periwinkle blue hover around him, strap him in, lift him, roll him past, past the staring faces and into the sun, into the impossible brightness of a cloudless blue sky.  
  
One of them presses something to his face and orders him to breathe. He does. Sleep smells like strawberries.   
  
Casey dreams of faded black leather interior and a well sexed back seat. 


End file.
